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Children of hippies (or grown-up hippies themselves) will recall Marlo Thomas's 1974 album Free To Be You and Me, which memorably included football great Rosey Grier singing "It's Alright to Cry." Even if you didn't know who this big tough-looking guy was, you knew he was a big tough-looking guy singing, "I know some big boys who cry, too," and you knew there was something awesome about that. And if you are or live with a Boston Celtics fan or a Los Angeles Kings fan, you've probably had this song going through your head for last few weeks. For it is one of the great ironies of sports that its fans (and athletes themselves), who spend so much time valuing the super-macho and ultra-physical, are often also, let's face it, crybabies.

Bill Simmons, possibly the most thoughtful sports fan there is, wrote an essay on crying about sports for the site Grantland called "The Consequences of Caring." He writes about the first time his daughter, a Kings fan, cried over sports: "I remained sympathetic while being secretly delighted, like she had passed some sort of 'Fledgling Sports Fan' hurdle or something." This is an essay about caring really an extra lot about sports. (Simmons writes, "Of the 75 greatest moments of my life, sports were involved in at least 20 of them") But it's also an essay about a father and a daughter, and about really caring about something, and about caring about what the people you care for care about. (Got that?)

Simmons wants to share his love of sports with his daughter because it's such a big part of his life. He doesn't even care if she latches onto a rival team, because after all, "Sports is a metaphor for life. Everything is black and white on the surface. You win, you lose, you laugh, you cry, you cheer, you boo, and most of all, you care." He just wants her to care, like he does. And when he realizes that she cares deeply enough to cry, he knows that on this level they understand each other.

Whether you and your father root for the same team or for mortal rivals, how nice, how lucky, if you can share an interest, whether it's sports or politics or rococo frescos. Everyone should have something they care about enough to cry over. And having someone who understands that beloved something can be one of the greatest gifts there is.

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On weekends the large park I live near is lousy with dogs. Specifically, very cute dogs being walked by optimistic young couples armed with toys, portable dog dishes, and those things that throw balls extra-far. That is to say, dog-babies. These couples love their dogs. As in, LOVE love. As in, they give their dogs licks of their ice cream cones. I know they do. I once had a dog-baby too. Still have the dog, only now she's just a dog. I sometimes want to stop these people and grip their arms and say, "Are you crazy? If you're not ready to have an actual baby, just nurture a plant or something! Enjoy your responsibility-free life! Do you know how long dogs LIVE?" Whatever. They won't listen anyway. Their ears are stoppered with sweet puppy love and fluffy little plugs of dog hair.

But what happens to these dog-babies when the young couples don't marry and have actual-babies? What happens when the couples break up? Marisa Meltzer and her boyfriend found themselves in this predicament when they split up, and decided to share custody of their dog, Chauncey. Meltzer writes for GOOD about how at first it worked out perfectly -- they lived across the street from one another and shared the dog. The dog was well-cared-for and happy, and Meltzer could sneakily keep tabs on her ex. Then her ex-boyfriend moved in with his new girlfriend, across town. Meltzer writes, "Only when Kevin stopped turning up in my apartment each afternoon was I able to understand that putting someone else’s needs first—the dog’s—required me to more closely monitor my own needs, too." Sharing the dog kept the two linked, which as anyone who's ever had an ex knows is part-nice and part-exhausting. But in the end, it was the dog's needs that allowed Meltzer to move on. She couldn't moon over her ex's new life. After all, she had a dog to take care of.

What a lucky dog-baby, first of all, to have people who love him so much. And also: how lucky we pet-owners are, to have these sweet animals around, teaching us lessons in forgiveness and moving on, helping us to practice varying emotional states, and being gracious enough, even after they've gone from being dog-babies to just plain dogs, to snuggle our feet on chilly evenings.

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Men! What are they thinking? We can't always answer that, but we'll be posting our favorite glimpses into their world in this space every Thursday.

Photo: Getty Images

* Justin Timberlake's legendary charm strikes again in this brief, entertaining interview: "I just made this conscious decision to appreciate what I do have and not wanting what I don’t have." (The Talks)

* Because no matter how much you love high fashion, it never hurts to lighten up, here is Seth Meyers' cheeky CFDA awards ceremony speech, including at least three laugh-out-loud jokes. (NYMag)

* Ever wondered what it would be like to live your life in silence? Read this fascinating email conversation with four Trappist monks. (The Awl)

* Philip Levine ends his tenure as poet laureate of the United States this week, but we think he's got a future resolving thorny dilemmas. "You need to see a shaman who can change who you are, and your wife needs to see a lawyer," he writes to a man who believes his wife ought to pay the bill for the cell phone he used to conduct an emotional affair. It only gets better from there. (NYTimes)

It's not often that my husband rides the Super Sweet Viral Video train, but the other morning he beckoned me to the computer, his eyes welling up, to watch this: The World's First Live Lip Dub Proposal. Watch the reactions of the (spoiler!) bride-to-be, and remember what you forgot you'd forgotten about the ecstasy of new love, the excitement of new marriage, and the awesomeness of the lip dub meme.

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We all have bits of family lore that haunt us: a friend of mine famously latched on to Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel, and, as her family never lets her forget, spent most of her eighth year flouncing about in a frilly dress moaning, "I vant to be alone! I vant to be alone!" I think of this caricature of Garbo's elegant tantrum about once a day, usually when the small people I live with follow me into the bathroom. But can a married woman, or someone with a family, ever really be alone? Does choosing one path (marriage, the creation of small people) negate the other (time alone to actualize oneself, to think deeply, to pee)? And is it even okay to "vant to be alone"?

In her thoughtful essay "The Lonely Ones," Emily Cooke writes about three female writers who recorded their battles with aloneness -- having it, enjoying it, using it, escaping it. As Cooke puts it, "A man who chooses to be alone assumes the glamour of his forebears. A woman’s aloneness makes us suspicious: Even today it carries connotations of reluctance and abandonment, on the one hand, and selfishness and disobedience, on the other." Reading this I had a flashback to banging on the door of my mother's art studio in the back of our house, saying, "But I just can't leave her alone for a minute, I just CAN'T!" Artists deserve time to themselves, of course. But mothers? No way!

Still, as Cooke points out, it's important for a creative person, for any person, to have some time alone. "Being alone lets you develop, become strange, be mad. If to be with people is to be socialized, to submit your rough edges to the whetstone of others’ desires, to be asocial is to be ragged and, thus, original." Maybe this is why our culture at large is so suspicious of women who want to be alone for a few hours or days or years at a time. We need women around, society seems to say, so it scares us when you say you need time alone. And I have to say, I get it, from society's point of view. Have you ever seen a little boy and a little girl playing together? It's basically a pantomime of the battle between wildness and civilization, personified. We need the females of the species to hang around and civilize everyone.

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I am somewhat of a connoisseur when it comes to the girl crush. First there was that girl in high school who seemed to not care what anyone thought of her, wore striped tights every day, and carried around unassigned novels. I studied her, followed her around, made her be my best friend. Then there was my faculty advisor in grad school, who had a glamorous life story (she had a famous writer-father, was raised in Italy, and, as a lucky teenager, sent to a posh boarding school), was accomplished in her field, was a devoted mother. My most recent girl crush is a blogger whose photos of her home, book club meetings, weeknight dinners, and crafts prove on a daily basis that her life is exquisite. 

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My daughter is obsessed with learning when she can do what and seems to have come to the conclusion, as she often reports to complete strangers, that when she turns 18 she will be able to drive a car, splash her brother in the pool, and -- finally! -- chew gum. When she is 4 she gets to play with Barbies and drink beer. Confused details aside, I have to confess that I share her fixation on milestones. Yes, I used to have one of those goofy lists of Things To Do Before I Turned 30. And 40 -- well! As a culture we love to freak out about turning 40. There's nothing sexy, it seems, about turning 40. So how is a thoughtful, non-age-obsessed-but-milestone-intrigued lady supposed to handle this birthday?

Poet Maya Stein has got this birthday on lockdown. Look at her plan: she's going to spend 40 days biking to 40 destinations, with her turquoise typewriter in tow. At every location she will stop and set up a typewriting station and invite people to contribute to a collaborative work of writing. Her goal, as she explains on her Kickstarter site, is "to bring people together through the written word, and to do so in a way that's collaborative yet personal, free-form yet structured." She goes on to explain that "by taking the time to do this all by bicycle, I want to encourage people to nurture the art -- and vital importance! -- of slowing down to engage more deeply with our physical environments, to connect to the movement and power of our bodies, and to connect with others through our words."

Now if that doesn't beat the pants off of drinking too much and getting teary over the List Of Things I Was Supposed To Do By Age 40, I don't know what does. What noble goals for all of us -- to make a milestone goal a crazy and dreamy one, to connect with others, to connect with our physical and creative selves. Preferably with a really cute bicycle and typewriter.

Check out Maya Stein's Kickstarter site to watch a video explaining the project and, if you want, to donate some money (and, awesomely, get the bike named after you).

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Elena Delle Donne is having a moment. The buzzed-about 6-foot-5 college junior has propelled the University of Delaware Blue Hens to their first-ever NCAA win. But a few years ago, after an auspicious high school basketball career, Dell Donne was awarded a scholarship to the women's basketball haven, the University of Connecticut, AKA, Hoops Heaven— only to return home a few days after school started to play for the (not very good) home team in Delaware. Why?

The answer: her sister. Delle Donne is extremely close with her older sister, who is blind, deaf, and has cerebral palsy. As Delle Donne explained to ABC News, "Skype, cellphone, texting, email — doesn’t work with Liz. We’ve never spoken a word to one another so the only thing we have is our physical contact. So that’s our whole relationship. It’s everything. She knows me by my smell and my feel, so, physically, physical contact is the only thing she knows. So when I did leave, I lost Lizzie basically. Well, she lost me and I wasn’t OK with that when I left.” Delle Donne then took a break from basketball for her first year of college because she was feeling burnt out and wanted to recapture the joy of the game (yet another reason to love her).

And now that Delle Donne is back in the game, leading her team to unprecedented victories, she has her sister to thank. As Delle Donne put it, “She teaches me that you just fight no matter what." (You have to watch the ABC video for the hug between Elena and Lizzy.) And that teaches us all a little something about the power of sisterly love.

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Anyone who's ever taken an undergraduate writing class at an urban university has encountered a thousand essays and poems that either have or could have the title, "The Amazing Revelation I Had From My Unexpected Conversation with the Crazy Guy on the Bus." There's something about being away from home for the first time that makes people so open to everything -- I know I wandered through my freshman year of college in an almost unbearable state of excitement, talking to strangers, trying everything (I'm talking mostly about my course selection, don't get excited), and accumulating sensory experiences like an alien just arrived on the planet. Like any self-respecting wide-eyed 18-year-old, I was obsessed with talking to the people every one else ignored: the washed-out townie at the diner in the middle of the night, the homeless lady with her army of homeless cats.

These days, not so much. I've become an expert ignorer of anyone who seems like they might need something -- strangers, oddballs, children. But Art Decker's post "Getting To Know Yourself By Looking Outward" on IlluminatedMind.net has me rethinking my "never-make-eye-contact" policy. He writes of our national obsession with getting to know ourselves through introspection, and suggests that "perhaps some of the time we spend reflecting could be put to better use living and engaging." I was really hoping he'd say that to know ourselves better we should wear pajamas and read in bed all day, but fine, whatever.

He writes that after a chance encounter left him feeling energized and inspired, he "vowed to meet a stranger every day." The post describes some of his amazing encounters with people he would have never spoken with had he not taken on his "beautiful experiment." (Read the whole post for the scalp-tingling conversation he had with his pharmacy cashier.) After a few months of talking to strangers, Decker writes, "Without a textbook, without a plane ticket, without really much effort at all, I’ve gained more insight and traveled further than ever before. And, I’ve also gotten to know someone I never knew that well before — myself."

If reaching out to a fellow human every day can do anything to deepen our self-knowledge (or really, even if it can't), isn't it worth a shot?

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One of the best presents I've ever been given was a big pile of garbage. It wasn't garbage to me, of course -- the stacks of discarded magazines, collected by my husband over several trash nights leading up to my birthday, provided perfect materials for making collages, one of my favorite pastimes. And more importantly, the only-slightly-smelly gift showed how well my husband knew me, and the effort he was willing to put into doing something he thought I might like. Even, say, digging through the stacks of trash out on the curb.

The blogger behind Purposefully Untitled knows what I'm talking about. As she wrote, "The nicest thing that anyone ever did for me...was to fill my refrigerator full of Diet Coke. Yes, it was that simple." She explains that she'd been working around the clock, and had run out of her beloved Diet Coke. Then one day she came home and found a fridge full of those silvery treasures, cans of Coke, and she reports that she was so touched, she cried.

Now, this lady obviously enjoys her soda, but that's not what made her cry. As she puts it, "That person knew me. That person knew how to love me."